There are many questions left unanswered in Red One, but the most pressing has to be: Is the Rock playing an elf or not? His character, Callum Drift, is definitely the head of an organization called ELF, which stands for Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification (there are multiple cute little acronyms like that in this movie), and which is basically the North Pole’s answer to the Secret Service. Callum isn’t human and is hundreds of years old, and when he fights, he likes to shrink himself down to approximately half his usual size, a trick whose utility isn’t entirely clear, but that does support the whole elfin theory. And yet, if the obvious joke is that Dwayne Johnson is playing an unlikely 270 cod- and creatine-fueled pounds of Santa’s little helper, the movie never quite gets around to landing it. It’s as though, because Will Ferrell’s Elf got there first, Red One is content with a gesture in the general region of the known hit. Red One was written by the Fast & Furious franchise’s Chris Morgan and directed by Jake Kasdan, and the whole thing is like that — rife with elements that are reminiscent of better movies without ever bothering to follow through on what it’s aping.
If Red One were a disaster, it’d be more interesting. Instead, it’s a technically passable action-comedy transparently stitched together from parts scavenged from other movies. Its brawny take on Santa, played by an unsettlingly swole J.K. Simmons, is reminiscent of the one in Rise of the Guardians. Its high-tech military approach to gift delivery recalls Arthur Christmas. And sure, there are only so many possible re-imaginings of Yuletide lore, which is why there’s a polar-bear guy out of His Dark Materials and a government organization (MORA, the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority, run by a stern Lucy Liu, in a thankless role that seems intended to be the Nick Fury of a theoretical holiday franchise) that feels co-opted from Hellboy. Callum’s fight choreography recalls a less exaggerated Ant-Man. The dynamic between Callum and tracker Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), meanwhile, is your classic buddy-cop back-and-forth, with the gruff Callum slowly warming to the disreputable criminal he’s forced to partner up with when Santa gets kidnapped two days before Christmas. Johnson and Evans could play these types in their sleep, and sometimes look like they might as well be, as they bicker and battle their way through various locations while on the case before making it to the final showdown.
The familiarity is the point with Red One, which might as well have been engineered to run in loops on cable, if that were still a thing. It’s a new movie that’s meant to feel like something you’ve already seen, like, I dunno, Jingle All the Way if the villain in Jingle All the Way were a Christmas witch played by Kiernan Shipka. The only surprising thing about it is that it reportedly cost $250 million, with details of its troubled production, up to and including bottles of A-lister piss, recounted entertainingly by The Wrap. There’s no real indication of the massiveness of that sum onscreen, which is enough to make you pine for the day when infamously bloated budgets were the result of scenes involving thousands of extras or sets knocked down and rebuilt to fit a director’s demanding vision. Red One darts from Philadelphia to Aruba to Bavaria to the Arctic, but doesn’t look like it takes place anywhere in particular. The North Pole itself is a cloaked jumble of old-fashioned buildings and modern skyscrapers that could only exist in a computer. There’s a dearth of establishing shots when our heroes magically transport themselves halfway around the globe by way of portals that connect the world’s toy stores that makes it feel like they’re really just stumbling around a backlot.
Evans, playing a compulsive gambler and deadbeat dad with a heart of gold, acquits himself well enough as a wise-cracking rogue whose redemption arrives with anticlimactic ease. The bigger issue is Johnson, who once upon a time was such a promising leading actor, a mountain of a man capable of embodying unexpected vulnerability. But as he’s gotten more powerful and more capable of shaping the projects he stars in, Johnson has gotten duller as an onscreen presence, and Callum is just another stoic, impossible badass in a growing line of them. It’s notable that even in a fantasy that gives him a device that transforms toys into their real-life equivalents, the only thing that sets Callum apart from the other characters Johnson has played in recent years is that his Under Armour shirt comes in muted Christmas colors. Most disappointing of all is that there’s a moment right out of the incredible scene at the start of 2010’s The Other Guys, when Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson leap off a tall building in pursuit of suspects as though their swagger will save them, only to splat on the pavement and die. In Red One, Johnson does the exact same thing unironically, diving off Santa’s tower after his captors, then swinging off other structures and finding his way into a snowmobile-chase sequence. It doesn’t look like there’s room for that kind of self-deprecation in Johnson’s career anymore.
